If you’re a bee living in Buffalo, New York, you probably spend most of your time waiting for summer to happen. And when the warm months finally arrive, you probably set up shop wherever you are and immediately start making honey. Last year, some Buffalo bees found themselves living in the window of an office building that was boarded shut and the were not welcome. So the kind architecture students at the University at Buffalo, built the bees their very own gleaming tower. And it looks awesome.

The slender tower is 22 feet tall and hexagonal in plan. The surface of the tower is finished with hexagonal tiles that have smaller, triangular fenestrations to allow the bees to come and go as the please, in and out of their new home. The bee hive is in a box in the top of the tower. And the entire box can be hoisted up and down the tower via a dumbwaiter (hence the project’s name: Elevator B) which allows beekeepers to keep the bee’s abode extra fresh. The project reminds me of this Bat Tower designed by Ants of the Prairie, an architecture firm based in Buffalo thats led by Joyce Hwang. Hwang is also a professor at UB and helped advise the students who designed and constructed the tower. It isn’t easy to inhabit the logic of bees, but it’s a bit easier to imagine why a bee would want to fly into Elevator B and stick around for a while.